Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday February 19, 2007 @01:04PM
from the always-with-the-shooting dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby has an ever growing number of alternative implementations, and many of these attempt to improve the suboptimal performance of the current mainstream interpreter. Antonio Cangiano has an interesting article in which he benchmarks a few of the most popular Ruby implementations, including Yarv (the heart of Ruby 2.0), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot). Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions. The tests show that Yarv is the fastest implementation and that it offers a promising future when it comes to the speed of the next Ruby version."

I was on the same boat until a couple of weeks ago... anyway, Ruby is The Hottest Thing Since Sliced Bread (TM). It's a programming language that was created in Japan all the way back in 1995. However, it has only just recently garnered mainstream interest due to the emergence of a web application framework built on Ruby, which is called Ruby on Rails and is said to be an incredibly well-thought and efficient framework.

I personally have an enormous interest in Ruby on Rails, as it seems to be a very neat way of writing web applications, but I'm also a bit daunted; it's a new language and a whole new framework with different ways of doing things, so it's been slow going learning it. I just wish I knew where to get some extensive sample code to peruse - that's how I learn best. All I've seen are some very basic applications which don't really teach you the real tricks and show how it all comes together.

Ruby is a dynamically typed, strongly typed, runtime-interpretted, very object-oriented programming language. It was created about the same time as Python (10+ years ago?), but is less well-known in the United States as it originated in Japan. It is the langauge that the Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.com] web framework is based on. See the official Ruby website [ruby-lang.org] for more information.

Yes, Ruby is the current web development flavor of the month, however, don't get caught up in the hype. There are good number of MVC web development frameworks in other languages, including even Lisp and Smalltalk, but most notably Python. In my opinion it makes more sense to learn a Python framework for a number of reasons. Mainly because Python is used in considerably more non-web applications than Ruby, which makes your skills more portable (and you more employable). Ruby on Rails is also very monolythic, while two of the the three most popular Python frameworks, TurboGears [turbogears.org] and Pylons [pylonshq.com] are very modular (especially Pylons since it's built around the WSGI [wsgi.org] spec). Finally, Python compiles to bytecode whereas Ruby does not. Hence Python outperforms Ruby in almost every shootout [debian.org].

Short answer: various things, compilation to bytecode before execution (I thought it was the case in the current interpreter, but might have been mistaken), etc.

Slightly less short answer: if I'm not mistaken, YARV includes a JIT compiler, similar to what Psyco [sourceforge.net] does in the Python world. Psyco has been known to accelerate code execution up to 100x times, so I'd expect YARV to be even faster than this benchmark shows when it's stabilized.

If you're going to mention Web Python Frameworks, don't forget Django [djangoproject.com]. Honestly they are all really good choices (Pylons, TG, Django, etc). I know you mention it in your "why py?" post, well, assuming it's the same post I read a few months back.:)

First off, the parent of my post said that the Windows port wasn't as fast as Linux and should be supported and worked on more. Ruby supports Windows just fine thank you.

Second, Ruby has had an interesting history. It was basically unknown in the west until Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt wrote the first book in English in 2000. At that time, the language started to take off, and only in the last few years has development really ramped up. So technically it is 12 years old, but in reality it is a very new language.

Unless you have Microsoft (.net) or Sun (Java) putting a huge amount of resources into development, languages take a long time to fully bake. This is normal, expected, and desired.

Choose to use Windows for development... heh, you almost had me there, nicely done.